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.
Carroll hired a detective and tracked
her mother down. In "Borrowed Fin-
ery," Fox says that she has had a close re-
lationship with her. Through her, Fox
also acquired a granddaughter, Carroll's
child Courtney Love, the grunge diva.
They had lunch together once. I t wasn't
a success.
At twenty-five, Fox married a public-
relations man, who was a good earner.
That union, which produced two sons,
lasted six years. Later, she married
Martin Greenberg, a critic and a trans-
lator, who at one point was an editor at
Commentary, together with his famous
brother, Clement. (Fox met Martin
when he rejected a story of hers.) In the
mid-sixties, the family moved for six
months to the Greek island ofThasos.
There Fox started her first novel, "Poor
George." During the next twenty-three
years, she produced five more novels, a
slow rate. She also wrote twenty-two
children's books-actually, they are
"young adult" books, most of them deal-
ing again with childhood sorrows-and
these, less daunting to write than regu-
lar fiction, may have interfered with her
work on novels.
I have read repeatedly that, in con-
trastwith the young-adult books, which
were quite successful ("The Slave
Dancer," from 1973, won the Newbery
Medal), Fox's novels were neglected.
But The New York Review of Books, that
exclusive institution, reviewed four of
her first five novels, very warmly. Ber-
122 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2011
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.
nard Bergonzi called "Poor George"
(1967) "the best first novel I've read in
quite a long time." Such appreciation
may have been due, in part, to her hus-
band's connections, but push does not
push forever, and Fox's critical success
lasted. A 1980 reprint of "Desperate
Characters" (1970) came adorned with
blurbs by Alfred Kazin ("brilliant per-
formance, quite devastating") and Lio-
nel Trilling ("a reserved and beautifully
realized novef'). Irving Howe wrote an
afterword for that edition, saying that
the book "takes its place in a major
American tradition, the line of the short
novel exemplified by 'Billy Budd,' 'The
Great Gatsby,' 'Miss Lonelyhearts,' and
' S ' h D ,,,
eize t e aYe
Nevertheless, by 1992 all six of her
novels were out of print. Now follows a
nice story. In 1991, the novelist Jona-
than Franzen was at Yaddo, the artists'
colony in upstate N ew York, thinking
about American fiction, specifically the
competing claims of postmodernism
(which he had been practicing up to that
time) and traditional storytelling fic-
tion (to which he soon converted, in
"The Corrections"). One day, in Yad-
do's library, he picked up Fox's "Des-
perate Characters" and read it, for the
first time. It seemed to him "akin to an
instance of religious grace," above all in
its alignment of the state of the soul
with the state of society-that is, in its
realism. Franzen mentioned this discov-
. " p h D "
ery In an essay, erc ance to ream,
that was published in Harper's in 1996
and was widely read, not for its com-
ments on Fox but for its support of tra-
ditional realism. Still, the mention of
Fox struck some people, including the
writer Tom Bissell, who was then a col-
lege student. Bissell eventually found a
copy of "Desperate Characters" and was
impressed. By that time, he was work-
ing as an editorial assistant at Norton,
and when the company's "paperback
committee" asked its younger employ-
ees to bring in ideas about what the
company might republish, he suggested
"Desperate Characters." The committee
authorized him to offer Fox fifteen hun-
dred dollars for reprint rights. She said
yes. The Norton edition has now sold
thirty-six thousand copies.
Between 1999 and 2002, Norton re-
published all her novels. It seems to me
unquestionable that, as Martin Green-
berg's literary friendships may have
helped Fox before, feminism helped her
now. If so, good for feminism. All these
new editions carried introductions by
conspicuous literati-Franzen, Jonathan
Lethem, Frederick Busch, Andrea Bar-
rett, Melanie Rehak, Rosellen Brown-
praising Fox extravagantly. Franzen,
in his introduction to "Desperate Char-
acters," described it as "soaring above
every other work of American realist fic-
tion since the Second World War"-
"obviously superior to any novel by Fox's
contemporaries John Updike, Philip
Roth, and Saul Bellow." Lethem, intro-
ducing "Poor George," offered a psycho-
analytic interpretation ofF ox's being out
of print. She had been "denied," he said,
because she wrote so searingly about
peoplè s habit of denial. He urged us to
correct our error: 'What I mean to say is,
for yourself, not for me or Paula or
George, read the book Listen to it." All
this sounds a little hysterical, and righ-
teous. (Many people, when reading
fiction, listen to it.) Nevertheless, these
writers and the editors at Norton got
Fox back into the bookstores, and on
the college syllabi. Not a moment too
soon. In 2001, she wrote her last impor-
tant book, "Borrowed Finery."
I n all her treatments of her early life,
Fox never tells us how she became a
writer. In the course of her nomadic
adolescence, she went to high school
for only five months. After her sons